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This paper summarizes discussions held on 24 May 2016 in Riga, Latvia, which focused on exploring the Kremlin and DAESH information activities in order to improve our understanding of the nature of these communications and their effect on Western societies. The questions discussed were:

How are the communications and messages of DAESH and the Kremlin constructed and disseminated?

Are their methods changing?

Why do such messages appeal to youth, even if they are familiar with Western Values and consumerism?

What are the weakest aspects of our information environment and what can we do to improve?

The electoral success and increased media presence of the Far-Right ideology known as the Alternative Right has catapulted the once marginal fringe movement into popular political discourse. The term Alternative Right is used in contrast to Alt-Right, which is a specific subsection of the broader Alt-Right who are associated with Richard Spencer. This dissertation examines the theories that make up the Alternative Right by addressing the question: How have the divergent political theory traditions of the Alternative Right coalesced into a new reactionary political ideology?The first half of the dissertation defines the Alternative Right and the historical context for the movement. The dissertation defines the Alternative Right by its axioms of the right to difference, the primacy of cultural metapolitics and hierarchical individualism. The second half examines the four major intellectual influences of the Alternative Right: The Techno-libertarians know as the Grey Tribe, NeoReactionary Thought, the European New Right and the American White Nationalists. The dissertation concludes that the divergent political theory of the Alternative Right is unified based on its shared reactionary values, its break from American liberal-conservativism and a consistent focus on the literature of radicalization and critique. The goal of the Alternative Right is a rebirth of racial/gendered consciousness and a new American/European renaissance.

This work analyzes some of the key lessons learned from the use of the Internet by jihadist groups over the last twenty years: 1) Online activism can be a substitute for commitment to armed jihad. 3) Terrorists are “early adopters” of new technologies, to enjoy spaces of impunity. 4) The investigation of terrorist activities on the Internet becomes increasingly difficult as a result of the adoption of measures of self-protection 5). The terrorist message on the Internet has the capacity to transcend the intentions of its creators.

Increasingly, global society is focused on the harm caused by material accessed on the internet. Individuals of all ages and backgrounds–policy makers, academics, politicians, mental health professionals, medical professionals and the general public–are seeking to understand the processes that govern the relationship between exposure to harmful content online and later harmful cognitions and behaviors. Several commentators have placed into stark focus several questions surrounding the use (and misuse) of the internet, and prevention of harm from it. Three issues come immediately to mind: First, what can be done to prevent the manifestation of harmful activities stemming from being online? Second, what is the underlying relationship between harmful material accessed online, and harmful behavioral outcomes? And third, what is the best approach (and how to we know what the “best” is) to prevent the manifestation of harmful behavior stemming from harmful content online? Rather than looking at each of these issues as a stovepipe, and seeking to answer each in isolation, in this chapter we adopt an integrationist perspective on the issue of preventing online harm online. Specifically, we will look at the theories of how and why exposure to extreme and harmful material online can cause negative real-world outcomes. We focus on the innovative Google-led program Jigsaw, 1 to explore the many and varied approaches that can be adopted to challenge and counter the issues of extreme and harmful material online. Finally, leveraging new approaches from public health (Su et al., 2021; Shortland et al., 2021), we outline the major ethical, practical, and theoretical issues that pervade technology-based efforts to tackle the issue of extreme and harmful material online.

Surfing on the Internet 2.0 revolution, Patani 2.0 has allowed Patani neojihadist militants to access new competitive spaces and create their own imagined online community by penetrating new realms of the Internet. This article discusses the use of new media militant propaganda by Patani militants and how it is Janus faced. It further examines how the Patani 2.0 social interaction enabled by social media such as YouTube leads to group cohesion among certain actors and the formation of a collective identity that is clustered around the notions of Muslim victimization and defensive jihad; and how, at the same time, it reinforces antithetical identities and fosters group identity competition, where one religious group is often pitted against another. As a result, the Janus effect of Patani neojihadist YouTube online propaganda, while it primarily seeks to radicalize, also generates a reactionary, often virulent, anti-Muslim response from the movement’s critics.

All over the world, extreme right activists and neo-nazis are using the Internet as a tool for communication and recruitment in order to avoid national laws and police investigations. The last 10 years have seen both the diffusion of CMC environments and the rise of extreme right movements in several European countries. This study investigates the structure of the Italian extreme right network, taking into account the latest trends in the social psychology of CMC to describe the nature of ties among Italian extreme right websites.